


Creatures of Snow

by unheroics



Category: Original Work
Genre: Body Horror, F/F, Horror, Mythical Beings & Creatures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-14 17:19:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13594740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unheroics/pseuds/unheroics
Summary: Ingrid could picture in her mind the opening paragraphs of her paper back in the exsanguinating confines of society. Linden, I. R. Vanishing Breeding Grounds: Arctic Tourism and Migratory Patterns of Pygoscelis Adeliae. Presented at the Symposium of Whatever, 2019.





	Creatures of Snow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sath/gifts).



The moon’s refracted light hit both snow and water with tentative reverence, barely enough to see by; the torch threw a triangle of shivering yellow across the packed ice, too small to do anything but stoke some primal, paradoxical claustrophobia.

Polar night spun the tide with dark fingers, the sky and ocean one listless black whole choking the Earth’s gentle curvature. In another few months the slight angles of descent would be visible, but for now Ingrid sat outside her tent wrapped into layers upon layers of thermal protection and felt immeasurably small, the only woman in the world save for the frayed tether of a two-way radio through which the comms officer sent her crackling and barely intelligible weather updates. The words “Acknowledged, thank you,” were the only ones she spoke aloud for three days until they became the only ones she thought herself capable of saying, an automaton ran on too little fuel. After the second update she’d already begun to feel the press of night and inevitably fear.

It was a strange thing, that fear, borne of instinct she imagined every human being carried out of the womb with them. The knowledge, intellectual and intrinsic, of the sheer enormity of it all. Two miles to Demeaux Station, several hundred to McMurdo, several thousand to any human settlement not an incursion upon a world hostile to its very presence.

She could picture in her mind the opening paragraphs of her paper back in the exsanguinating confines of society. _Linden, I. R. Vanishing Breeding Grounds: Arctic Tourism and Migratory Patterns of Pygoscelis Adeliae. Presented at the Symposium of Whatever, 2019._ Polite clapping, erudite questions, sensible turtleneck and menswear looked at askance, glasses slipping down the bridge of her nose.

There were shapes moving in the periphery of her vision, unreachable until she turned and they dissipated, nothing but darkness staring back with a gaze so heavy she felt it travel from the back of her neck to the last rungs of her ribs and within.

It was her third month as a winter-over and already the existence of places north of the Pole seemed a fevered dream, unlikely and insignificant in the face of the vast and empty uncaringness of snow. This un-place of terrifying wonder that she could hardly put human names to.

She had thought she would pack Butler and Yeats and Nabokov and took six extra boxes of tampons instead, and an iPod she hadn’t once used, too enamoured of the silence.

Zipped up in her tent, the radio spat white noise. Then: “Linden, Rahm. Come in, Linden.”

She moved her body with effort, stuck as she had been in the same position until her limbs had become those of a badly strung-together puppet. Her shadow trembled in the sparse light of the torch as she reached inside the tent, stiff clumsy gloved fingers searching for the receiver.

“Linden,” she said. She’d almost said _Acknowledged, thank you_ and it was a small shock to hear her vocal cords twist into a new shape. “What is it?”

“You need to come back. We’re seeing a blizzard headed your way, ETA four to six hours.”

“Acknowledged. Thank — did you hear that?”

A low scratching dragging noise. Like a fork on china. Half-delirious scenarios ran through her mind, fuelled largely by the customary viewing of _The Thing_ at the start of Demeaux’s winter vigil and the knowledge that several seal species were second only to killer whales as predators. But it couldn’t be. But she had no weapons. So forth.

The radio thumped onto her sleeping bag and she was blinded momentarily by the gust of white mist as she unzipped the tent again and breathed out. Then she saw.

The yellow V of torchlight fell across a large and perfectly mangled corpse of an emperor penguin. Its blood froze before it could stain the snow — no splatter, it had been dragged from elsewhere — and half-moons of tearing wounds spelled its cause of death, too small, too small to be real.

Inside the radio kept sputtering. Ingrid’s breath was very loud.

A trail of footprints led away from the penguin, disappearing into the depthless night, bare feet on packed ice just faint enough in their outline that Ingrid knew they had to be a trick of the moon’s refracted light.

She had never disassembled her tent so quickly before. Her hands shook as she took her snowshoes, her ski sticks, her GPS, the shivering dregs of her rational mind, and the impossible afterimage of a human shape on the insides of her eyelids.

-

As always the station’s lights came into view some fifty metres out, the base wedged into the dip behind a gentle hill that obstructed southbound sight lines. Its windows shone in a morbid parody of domestic safety, white and clinical, energy efficient but still demanding enough that nothing save jet fuel could jumpstart it. Three generators and all of them guzzling toxicity to make life sustainable for those who were never meant to be sustained.

Inside light blinded her after thirty or so hours spent in the dark, where her body had felt solid only for its infinite fragility and each vein seemed its own conscious animal fighting for survival. Life no longer coursed through her surrounded by thick walls and men she did not know, replaced by a warped illusion of it: breathing tissue like machine parts.

The station manager, an aggressively ginger man named Hellqvist, caught her as soon as she’d struggled out of her gear and into inside clothes.

“Ingrid,” he said in mild surprise, enormous beard twitching at his smile. He was the only one who used her first name, trying to include her, invitations to movie nights and all; Ingrid wished he’d stop. “You were scheduled to get back tomorrow. Is everything all right?”

There were twenty-two winter-overs at Demeaux and Hellqvist knew them all in invasive detail: everyone’s business and working hours and bowel movements. In a place so remote, so wholly removed from anything that cared even slightly for its inhabitants’ survival, secrets were more precious than satellite signal.

“Rahm told me there is a blizzard coming in. And my penguins moved north again,” she said. His tour of duty involved observation of temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. She could tell him anything. “I’ll have to track them later. There’s too much traffic spilling over from McMurdo.”

“Americans,” he said as if shunted penguins and melting ice caps gave any thought to the flag under which their slow devastation was enacted. As if division into nations, the flimsiest social mechanism of illusory power, marked some oil rigs as better and others as worse.

Placid but confused the winter-over doctor, Park, ran a smattering of tests and bloodwork to no avail.

“Could it be lead poisoning,” Ingrid asked, clinging to the waning hope that she was not going mad with exposure and isolation and total, indelible helplessness.

“Your BLL is within normal range. If you told me why you think there is something wrong, perhaps.”

She scrubbed one hand over her face and through her hair, undoubtedly leaving an even more impressive mess than was usual. Maybe instead of _The Thing_ the station manager should organise annual viewings of _The Shining_. But, “It’s fine,” she said, and ignored Dr Park’s look which said that clearly it was not.

Back in her cubby hole of a room — the dubious privilege of single occupancy for the only woman on rotation — she read through her notes thrice over searching for signs of a disintegrating mind, not quite relieved to find none.

In the end she did the only thing she could. The only thing restlessness and an inexplicable pull of the unknown would allow. She combed her hair into a semblance of respectability and went to Hellqvist to request leave for a three day long excursion onto the ice shelf to observe the behavioural patterns of local and migratory fauna.

-

Four lightless days later on her way out, after the blizzard had died down: Demeaux Station stood silent and lonely and within its reinforced walls roamed ghosts of support staff and researchers, all nursing shadows beneath their eyes. Ingrid saw them and herself as though from a bird’s eye view, machines executing their runtime commands. Two out of three satellites were obstructed and so network connectivity kept the station radio silent, removed from the waking world completely, and the solitary runway breathed free as no aircraft would stampede across it for months still. Packages unsent, specimen and research data deliveries marked for the farthest corners of wherever, wherever.

There were real, tangible bootprints in the snow just outside. It was -57°C and Ingrid carefully allowed no stretch of her skin to be met by air, fragile capillaries protected by the cloth of her flesh and hilariously expensive gear. The compound was as ugly as it was unnecessary, worse even than its featureless cramped innards.

She did not look back.

-

She knew she was going mad because at approximately 23:01 local time the darkness outside her tent took the shape of a woman, who was naked, and had weed-like hair the colour of damp coal that ran the length of her corpse-grey and spotted body. Parted to fall across both shoulders it drifted in the wind beneath the generous curves of her breasts, picked up again in tight curls between her thighs and down her shins.

A quick order of other things Ingrid noticed and catalogued immediately, frozen with delirious terror: arms soaked black to the elbows until torchlight fell upon them and the stains revealed themselves red; the young and very dead seal in her right hand, mirounga leonina, explaining the blood. As she moved closer, ambling carefully but sure-footed over packed ice: the shape of her large and full with evenly distributed subcutaneous fat, _my God, not nearly enough to survive in these temperatures_.

Close enough that Ingrid had to look up to keep her, all of her, in her field of vision the woman sank to the ground and settled in graceless repose, legs half-crossed, uncaring or simply unashamed of her nakedness where her thighs were spread. She had the most extraordinary face, too symmetrical to be anything but abject and inhuman, no sclera visible outside the flat black of her irides. But it was her skin that Ingrid stared at, mute and deaf from the thud of her heart in her throat: it was slick and grey and smooth, spots as black as her eyes spilling over her flanks and shoulders.

“Eat?” she asked, offering the seal.

“Thank you, no,” said Ingrid inanely. In stages of hypothermia this level of delirium came shortly before paradoxical undressing, which came shortly before death. She would begin to feel warm soon.

Yet it was the seal that did it, madness and fear coalescing into childhood memories and a quiet little library in Uppsala that had sheltered her when her parents fought. Fairytales. Strange creatures of snow and water. Perhaps childhood fairytales would tide her over into peaceful forever sleep.

The selkie frowned in vague displeasure but in a blink the expression dissipated and she sank her teeth — too many, too sharp — into the seal’s supple flesh, raw, tearing at the fat and muscle and chewing thoughtfully as she watched Ingrid. It was a fresh kill: steam rose from the viscera.

Her voice was muffled by the two scarves she had wrapped about her face beneath the snow goggles. “Did you follow me?”

The selkie nodded as blood congealed around her mouth, which had no lips. “You’re not made to live here,” she said over a mouthful of raw meat. Ingrid didn’t know why she’d have expected her to be beautiful, or even pleasant to look at. All she could look at, in truth, were the rows of red-streaked teeth, teeth of a predator.

“No one is.”

“I am,” said the selkie, then amended with a twist of her neck that encompassed the ice shelf, perhaps the entire Southern Ocean, while her hands were busy: “We are. You can’t hunt.”

“We used to. I…I suppose we got lazy.”

The selkie nodded again. It was altogether not strange to hear her speak fluent Swedish, consonants rolling off her tongue with a faint country accent. Ingrid should have been radioing in for a med-evac, but instead continued to wait for deceptive hypothermic warmth that refused stubbornly to come.

“Will you,” she said, then swallowed several times. She wished for strength to turn the torch the other way and cast the selkie back in the darkness she’d come out of. The sight of her churned Ingrid’s stomach. “What are you going to do?”

Don’t-drown-me-don’t-drown-me-don’t-drown-me. A staccato prayer to the beating core of her failing body to make death painless. There was no reply as the selkie kept eating, and watching her, unmoving save for the clench and release of her jaw and her hands until her prey was little but a grotesquely crumpled sheath for bones to rot in. Skin-bag, and Ingrid would wonder if the selkie felt regret for the slaying of another of her kind, but she knew that leopard seals were known to hunt other, smaller ones. That they played with their prey sometimes. Killed for sport sometimes. Breath came to her lungs with difficulty.

She gasped out loud when the selkie lunged, movement bursting out of her with sudden violence — the throat, the throat. But she only pressed her flattish nose to the side of Ingrid’s neck, barely felt through layers of thermal insulation but horribly audible as she took in a deep long breath. Smelling her.

“I’ll find you. Eat,” she said.

She left Ingrid with nothing but the terrified shiver of her breath and its mist in the air, a heart lodged behind her teeth and struggling to get out, and the rapidly freezing carcass.

-

Ingrid did not return to Demeaux Station.

-

“Where do you sleep,” she asked twelve hours later, though time was never more clearly a gentlemen’s agreement than during polar night, when hours bled into one another without change save for those too large to be observed by the naked eye, “where — who took your skin?”

The selkie, who gave her no name but did give her another dead animal and seemed unswayed by the sight of Ingrid’s supply of MREs, stopped her survey of the tent’s meagre interior. She was bored by Ingrid’s research but found the iPod delightful; in the reddish glow of the hanging battery light she looked no less wild and terrifying, strength obliquely hidden in the wide slopes of her hips, and Ingrid found her gaze straying. Her stringy, saltwater-stiff hair was longer than the selkie was tall.

“A ship,” she said. “A net, not very far. They caught everything they could reach, they didn’t look. So I cut it off.” She mimed ripping something with her teeth and Ingrid shuddered. Stories and fairytales never went into detail about the process of removal. There were no scars that she could see.

“And you came here.”

“And you came here,” the selkie parroted with identical inflection.

She moved like animals moved, measured and sudden with purpose. The atavistic underbelly of Ingrid’s brain that still flinched at bumps in the night told her not to bare her throat for the predator, but the tent was insulated, almost warm, and her many layered outside gear was a suffocating prison, bleeding her of clear thoughts. It was an effort to pull off her scarves and unzip the top of her thermal jacket, push her goggles up her forehead until she could watch the selkie without their mild fisheye distortion.

The selkie’s lipless mouth stretched in a smile at the sight, but she did not go for Ingrid’s jugular. When she moved in it was telegraphed, low-balanced as to project her lack of killing intent. Her face pressed to Ingrid’s cheek was smooth and soft and terribly, terribly cold. Ingrid felt flat nostrils twitch as the selkie breathed in two sunless days of sweat buildup on her skin. The selkie, in turn, smelled like blood and mildew, an unfresh animal smell.

With shaking hands Ingrid reached out and up to (drown-me-don’t-drown-me-don’t) touch the selkie’s naked flank, so careful it nearly made her heart stop. Monstrous as she was her flesh was pliant, dipping obediently under the press of Ingrid’s fingers, skin a little oily, sleek and stretched taut over protective layers of muscle and fat.

The selkie laughed though it sounded more like a hacking sort of cough, something thorny ripped off her palate.

“You have it,” the selkie rasped. “Your people in the metal house. It’s pulling, here” — she patted Ingrid’s solar plexus with an open palm — “I want it back. Can you give it back?”

“Your skin,” Ingrid said. She was fairly certain the discovery of a selkie roaming the lethal waters of the Southern Ocean would have reached even her, the last one to hear all news at Demeaux. “It’s…at the station? Why?”

Deep subterranean thrum as the selkie sighed, hungry perhaps for the warmth of Ingrid’s hand. She did not answer, but Ingrid could not expect her to answer any more than she could expect her research subjects to stand still as she catalogued them: a lonely census taker at the edge of the world. She let the selkie rub her face with her own, cheekbones over cheekbones and nose over forehead and mouth — almost like a kiss, warm and intimate as air travelled between their lungs. Maybe it was a kiss. Maybe some parts of the stories were true.

“Yes,” she said to keep from sneezing at the tickle of wiry hair. That part was true after all. “Okay. Yes, okay.”

-

The skin, when she found it in deep freeze scheduled to be sent for a postmortem at a marine institute with one of the supply flights bound to circle with the sun, if/when it ever returned: a soft but ugly wrinkled thing nothing like the shed skin of a snake, as a part of her had expected. It was dry and coarse inside, darker in patches where salt hadn’t bleached it yet to the colour of paper. The coat was darker than the selkie’s un-human skin but spotted in an identical pattern, as large as Ingrid would expect of a leopard seal. Ingrid was tall, but wrapped in her true skin the selkie would dwarf her.

The selkie, upon the sight of her skin, let out a noise so unlike any that a human throat could parse that it sent a wild and buzzing shiver down the entire length of Ingrid’s spine jumping vertebra to vertebra and sinking, at last, into her pelvis where her fear and want both lived in self-immolating conjunction.

“Lovely girl,” the selkie hummed, hoarse and biting as she slithered across the tent floor to where Ingrid lay half-paralysed with warring instincts. “Lovely, lovely girl.”

No one had used that word to describe her since Anja, probably, second-to-last in a disappointing parade of ex-girlfriends. Her life to date seemed like something she’d memorised out of a book, something another woman had lived and recounted the events for Ingrid. Her research, her studies and childish drive to save the world and confine it in catalogues of precise measurements, all insignificant and faraway. All belonging to someone not accosted by a wild creature with listless black eyes. As though the packed ice of the polar south had given birth to her and now. Now. Now it wanted her back.

She shivered at the selkie’s touch, blunt fingers skittering like many-legged insects across her shins and knees and thighs. She shivered right out of her thermal parka with the selkie’s help, tugging at zippers and nosing at newly exposed layers.

“Where will you go?” Ingrid asked. If she tried to stand she would only trip over the selkie’s weed garden of hair where it was gathered on the tent floor. She didn’t want to stand, fearful to break the spell of the selkie’s goodwill. She pictured her so clearly on solitary remote Bouvetøya, in the loneliest and freest places across all Earth’s waters, the most untouched: safe until the glaciers warmed in a slow boil of hostility and sunk into the sea. “Now that you’re free.”

Again the words echoed back to her with the same inflection: “Where will you go?”

The selkie pressed her body into Ingrid’s with a sinuous, peristaltic ripple, every inch of bare oil-slick skin sliding against thermal protection that offered no real safety at all. Not against a predator. Home, Ingrid thought: I would go home, into the free unpolluted sea that had birthed me. Away, away from the slow devastation of all that the world was in the service of all the ways it could be exploited, used, disassembled and left in pieces.

What she said were no words at all but rather a selection of completely and painfully human sounds as she grew too warm to stay clothed. The selkie helped her rid herself of shirt after shirt after shirt, until at last she could push the remaining one open without pulling it off Ingrid’s shoulders. Gooseflesh bloomed over her chest.

“You’re pale like a fish,” the selkie said. Cheap compliment from a woman-not-woman the colour of a week-old corpse dragged out of murky waters. She smelled of brine and decaying sea life, the tent smothered in it, but she warmed with each touch and, delighted, grazed her many sharp teeth over indentations between Ingrid’s ribs, over the swell of her breasts where sweat gathered, in full-faced sleek-slick kisses.

And Ingrid would let the selkie take her anywhere, anywhere, doomed and yearning, to the heights of climax and depths of the ocean.

Clever fingers, perhaps her own, worked at the seams of her trousers and thermal underwear. Her muscles spasmed in time with the rabbit-quick beat of her heart that she felt in her whole body, ribs to the soles of her feet but mostly between her legs, at the lonely, living core of her body. Her selkie settled there perfectly at home: she was heavy and her hair was choking where it got into Ingrid’s mouth, her teeth an occasional bright flash with old blood caked in the ridges. Ingrid couldn’t remember why she hadn’t thought her beautiful before.

Her selkie’s skin covered them both like a mourning veil, catching heat and noise and thick enough to strangle.

-

“Does it hurt,” she asked the selkie, who was her selkie, watching her lay the skin across the tent floor. It had to be folded twice over to fit between their bodies into the uneven square of their spread legs.

“Yes.” The selkie lifted her gaze from her skin to Ingrid, so intent that Ingrid wished she could change places with the dead flesh stretched before her just to be looked at like that. “More you than me.”

Sweat was quick to cool on Ingrid’s bare skin, but she didn’t feel it. She felt no chill. Felt it even less as the selkie extended one arm to cradle her face in a smooth-slick palm. “I’ll show you,” she said, drowning out the very hazy thought that had come unbidden to Ingrid about paradoxical undressing and final stages of something or other. “But it will hurt to look at.”

Slowly the selkie surveyed her naked arms, their grey spotted coat, as if looking for seams or scars, as if she were a plastic doll welded from incongruent bits to be un-pieced together at the end of their usefulness, the lighter grey of her skin no more or less monstrous than the dried husk that had kept the two of them warm. A sudden stab of revulsion gripped Ingrid by the throat as she realised what her selkie would need to do to clothe herself with the sealskin she’d had to tear off with her teeth. How many of her kind, how many others flayed themselves to escape. She owed her selkie the gift of witnessing, standing in for the forward rush of a world that had stripped her of a habitat.

“I want to see,” she said. Teeth would hurt, she thought. She had a pocket knife.

And she watched her selkie begin to cut.

-

In her third month as a winter-over at Demeaux Station, several hundred miles from McMurdo and several thousand from the nearest habitable human settlement that was not a colonisation for the sake of pointless mastery, Ingrid stepped out of her tent and into the stillness of polar night.

She was wrapped into raw bloody strips of her selkie’s freshly shorn skin. It was warmer than any manmade thermal clothing and Ingrid felt for the very first time in this place as though she was made to belong, the atavistic terror of the vast and sunless expanse of snow and water a more welcoming un-sight than a metal box, a lecture hall in any marine institute or university, a library in Uppsala. Her breath came out in clouds of frigid mist, barely visible in the dark but for the refracted moonlight, and she felt her hair wild and freezing in place as the sweat coating it dried into salt. The soles of her feet stuck to packed ice, every step she took toward the yawning primal womb of the ocean a struggle, but she didn’t feel the cold or pain of it.

For creatures of snow it would be a short time before their ordered lives were driven into even further chaos, leaving them scrabbling for purchase in places disintegrating beneath their claws. The future would march on, cruel as ever.

Clad in a new skin the selkie — the emergent animal — couldn’t speak words any longer, monstrous and unknowable and wholly, completely beautiful. She slid and slithered to the ocean and Ingrid left a trail of bloody footprints over the ice shelf as she followed her selkie home.

**Author's Note:**

> demeaux station is loosely based on the amundsen-scott south pole station, but all aspects of arctic research, geography and habitation depicted in this story are completely fictional and hilariously inaccurate. there is however a documented case of a leopard seal who tried to feed penguins to a natgeo photographer. [bouvet island](https://href.li/?https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/bouvet-island) is also a real place with a complementary [freakish story](https://href.li/?https://mikedashhistory.com/2011/02/13/an-abandoned-lifeboat-at-worlds-end).


End file.
